Documentation

Install

OpenScreenShot is available on the Chrome Web Store.

1. Open the OpenScreenShot listing in Chrome.
2. Click Add to Chrome.
3. Accept the permissions. The extension needs the active tab and permission to run its capture script there.
4. The OpenScreenShot icon appears in your toolbar. Click it to open the popup.

Capture a screenshot

Click the OpenScreenShot icon in your toolbar and the full page capture starts — no menu in the way. Everything runs locally in your browser. There are four ways to start a capture:

• The toolbar icon — one click captures the full page. Turn Icon click captures the full page off in settings to get the mode picker popup back; right-click the icon for the other modes and settings.
• A keyboard shortcut — Ctrl+Shift+S for the full page, Alt+Shift+V for the visible area, Ctrl+Shift+E for a region. On macOS these are ⌘⇧S, ⌘⇧V, and ⌘⇧E. Rebind them at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
• The right-click menu — the OpenScreenShot submenu on any page offers the same three modes and Settings.
• Repeat region — the popup footer and the right-click menu re-capture the last region rectangle. Both items appear once you have selected a region.

The Delay row in the popup holds a capture for 3, 5, or 10 seconds, and the toolbar badge counts down. Use it for hover states, dropdown menus, and tooltips that close the moment you click somewhere else.

Capture modes

Full Page

Captures the entire scrolling page and stitches it into one image. The extension scrolls the page viewport by viewport, captures each tile, and composites them together. Fixed headers are captured on the first tile and composited once at the top. Pages that scroll an inner element instead of the window work too.

Visible Area

Captures the current viewport instantly. No scrolling. Use this for a quick screenshot of what is on screen right now.

Selected Region

Click and drag to draw a rectangle. Resize handles appear on each edge and corner. Use the arrow keys to nudge the selection by one pixel at a time, or hold Shift to move it ten pixels at a time. Press Enter to confirm or Esc to cancel.

After a capture

The After capture row in the popup picks what a finished capture does. It applies to every entry point: the popup buttons, the keyboard shortcuts, and the right-click menu.

• Editor — open the annotation editor in a new tab. This is the default.
• Clipboard — copy the screenshot and skip the editor. Paste it straight into a chat, a document, or an issue.
• Download — save the screenshot to your downloads folder and skip the editor. Quick saves are written as PNG.

Clipboard and Download open no tab, so the toolbar badge is the confirmation. A failed capture flashes ! on the badge. Reopen last in the popup footer opens the most recent capture in the editor at any time.

Annotate

The editor opens in a full tab and loads the most recent capture from local storage. Each tool has a one-letter shortcut.

• Select V — move, resize, or delete any annotation. Double-click a text layer to re-edit it.
• Rectangle R — draw a border rectangle.
• Arrow A — draw a directional arrow.
• Line L — the arrow without a head.
• Pen P — freehand drawing.
• Highlighter H — a translucent freehand stroke.
• Text T — add a text box, sized by the font-size control.
• Step number S — numbered badges that count up on their own, and renumber when you delete one.
• Blur B — hide sensitive content as a soft blur, a coarse mosaic, or an opaque fill. The opaque fill survives recompression.
• Spotlight O — rectangle, rounded rectangle, or ellipse cut-outs that merge into one dim layer.
• Eyedropper I — take a color from the capture. It samples what you see, so a color inside a spotlight or on a beautify gradient picks as it looks. The swatch button on the color row opens Chrome’s screen-wide picker for anything outside the canvas.
• Crop C — trim the image to a selected area.

Hold Shift while you draw for square rectangles and 45° lines and arrows. The style bar carries an 8-color palette on 1–8, a custom color, recent colors, three stroke widths, and a font-size control. Your choices are remembered across sessions. Undo and redo are Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z, or ⌘Z / ⌘⇧Z on macOS.

Beautify

The Beautify panel in the top bar frames the screenshot for sharing: padding, corner radius, and drop-shadow sliders, plus six gradient presets, a custom solid color, or a transparent background. The frame previews live and travels into every export, the clipboard, and PDF.

Annotate an image you already have

Drop an image file onto the editor stage, or paste one with Ctrl+V / ⌘V outside a text field. The import takes the same seat a capture takes, so every tool, the beautify frame, and every export path keep working, and the top bar reads Imported. Importing replaces the canvas, so the editor asks first when there are annotations to lose.

Export

Click Export in the top bar of the editor, or press Ctrl+S / ⌘S. Choose a format:

• PNG — lossless, keeps transparency.
• JPEG — smaller files, adjustable quality.
• WebP — adjustable quality like JPEG, transparency like PNG.
• PDF — export as a single image page, fit to A4/Letter, or split across multiple pages with a 5mm overlap so content is not cut mid-line.

Scale exports at 25, 50, 100, or 200 %, or at an exact pixel width. It is hidden for PDF, which sizes to the page instead. A size past Chrome’s canvas limit is refused rather than written as an empty file.

Ctrl+C / ⌘C copies the finished image straight to the clipboard. The export dialog can also save its current settings as your new defaults.

Record a tab

Click Record in the popup, or press Alt+Shift+X to stop once a recording is running. The first time you record, Chrome shows one permission prompt for tab capture; every recording after that starts in a single click.

Start a recording

The Record row in the popup has three toggles — Mic, Tab audio, and Webcam — turn on any of them before you click Record. With the mic or webcam on, your browser’s own permission prompt appears from a small bubble on the page before capture starts.

If a recording navigates to a different site, the control bar needs the optional “Record across sites” permission (see Settings) to follow it there. Without that permission the toolbar badge turns amber; click the toolbar icon or interact with the page again to reattach the overlay.

The control bar

A small bar sits at the bottom of the page while you record: a timer, a chip for each track you enabled, and Pause/Resume, Stop, and Cancel buttons. With the webcam on, a draggable circular preview floats over the page — drag it anywhere and it stays there for the rest of the recording.

The bar hides itself about three seconds after your pointer leaves it, so it stays out of your recording. Move your cursor to the bottom center of the page to bring it back. It stays visible while you hover it, and while the recording is paused.

The editor

Stop opens the recording editor on a timeline of your take. The editor adds a smooth 2x zoom at every click your cursor made — adjust or delete any of those, or add your own manual zoom blocks at 1.5x, 2x, or 3x. Trim the start or end of any segment by dragging its handles. Click ripples mark where you clicked, and the webcam bubble, Beautify frame, and mic/tab-audio volume sliders live in the side panel. Show cursor draws a smooth pointer that follows your recorded cursor path; turn it off in the settings rail.

Export

Export re-renders the take through canvas, mixing in the tracks and effects you set, and downloads a WebM file.

Drafts

Your edits are saved locally as you work. If the editor tab closes or crashes, the next editor tab offers the draft back. Restoring is always a click, so a stale draft never replaces a capture you meant to start fresh. A cropped image gets its own draft, so annotations never restore against the wrong picture.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? in the editor for the full sheet. Beyond the tool letters above:

• 1–8 — set the annotation color.
• Ctrl+C / ⌘C — copy to the clipboard.
• Ctrl+S / ⌘S — export.
• Backspace — delete the selected annotation.
• Esc — deselect, or cancel a crop.
• Ctrl / ⌘ with +, −, or 0 — zoom in, zoom out, actual size. F fits to the screen.
• Space + drag — pan the canvas.

Alt+Shift+X stops the current recording from anywhere — it does not need the editor or the popup open.

Settings

Open the gear icon in the popup to set:

• Theme — light, dark, or system.
• Default format — PNG, JPEG, WebP, or PDF.
• Quality — for JPEG, WebP, and PDF.
• Filename template — click a token chip to insert {date}, {time}, {title}, {domain}, {w}, or {h}. A live preview shows the result.

Settings live in local storage on this device. Reset to defaults at the bottom of the panel takes two clicks.

Record across sites — off by default. Turning it on requests the optional <all_urls> host permission, so the recording control bar and cursor overlay can follow a tab that navigates to a new site mid-recording.

Agents & CLI

openscreenshot (npm) is a separate, optional, local tool for scripting screenshots from the command line or from an AI agent. It drives the Chrome already on your machine — no browser download, no hosted service. Set CHROME_PATH if your Chrome cannot be found automatically.

npx openscreenshot shot https://example.com --out shot.png --full

As an MCP server, add this to your MCP client config:

{ "command": "npx", "args": ["openscreenshot", "serve"] }

Then call the capture_screenshot tool with { "url": "https://example.com" }.

Privacy

OpenScreenShot processes everything locally in your browser. Captures are stored in Chrome local storage and are not uploaded to any server. Recordings, cursor logs, and mic/webcam streams stay in IndexedDB on your device until you delete them. The extension has no analytics, no telemetry, and no third-party services.

See the Privacy Policy for the full details.

Get help

See the Support & FAQ page for common questions and known limitations. If you need more help, open an issue on GitHub.